Denigrating aside shaped Mariano

Thursday

He was a boy of 9 or 10 when he walked to his friend’s single-family home and rang the doorbell. The father answered. By way of polite inquiry, he asked the boy where he lived.

The boy told him. The man’s friendly smile disappeared and he shut the door.

“I could hear him yelling at his son,” said the caller, now a man of 61. “He was telling him that kids like me won’t amount to anything. I remember the walk home. It was the longest walk of my life.”

Unbeknownst to the boy, that walk would take him on a path that later led back to his roots, and an effort to change the future of children still unable to walk through doors because they’re stuck in a generational logjam of poverty and welfare.

The boy was Raymond V. Mariano, who today runs the Worcester Housing Authority and the sprawling low-income complex, Great Brook Valley, in which he was raised. Mariano would break the cycle, becoming a successful executive and mayor of a city.

He’s no bleeding heart, but he knows the Valley. He understands the mindset and the challenges of unemployed residents who are going nowhere and passing the dead-end legacy of dependency on to their children.

“Some people need a little extra motivation,” is how he puts it. “There’s a lot of young people here, and they need someone to give them direction. You see what’s ahead for most of these kids, and it breaks your heart.”

So the former Worcester mayor is initiating a public housing revolution — he’s putting people who live there to work. Which sounds deceptively simple, but it’s taken more than a year of careful planning. If approved and implemented, his program could serve as a national model.

In a nutshell, here’s how it would work: Armed with public grants, the program would provide aid and resources to able-bodied residents under 50 to help them get a job or attend school full time. Residents who refuse to participate would see their rent doubled and eventually increased to market rates. Residents who do get jobs can take part in an escrow program that would provide money when they leave public housing.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? So great, that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before.

“It’s an enormous amount of work,” Mariano said. “I’ve been trying to do something like this for several years, but couldn’t come up with the time to put the plan together. And people are afraid of taking a hit. They’re worried they’ll be viewed as a terrible person. But I’ve been in politics for years and I just never worried about it. The current system is a failure.”

It may be politically incorrect in some circles to demand that people on public assistance go to work, but Mariano said he’s been surprised by the overwhelming support he’s received from both Democrats and Republicans alike, from the local mayor to U.S. Rep James McGovern and Sens. John Kerry and Scott Brown.

“I admire your initiative, insights, desire, compassion and care to change the paradigm and genuinely give these individuals and families a sustainable, bright future,” City Manager Michael O’Brien wrote to Mariano last week. “It is an incredible opportunity. These innovations are the building blocks to change the course of the nation, quite frankly, to the positive.”

Indeed. Mariano recently went to Atlanta to view a similar program, and he knows the stark facts: Nationwide, 2.2 million people live in public housing projects and spend an average of eight years in them. In Worcester, about 80 percent of those residents are unemployed, many of them poor, single women raising children who will also be poor. There’s little incentive to be otherwise.

Mariano said he was recently chatting with a teenager from GBV when he asked him what he wanted to be as an adult. The teen had no answer, so Mariano asked him again.

“He couldn’t think of anything,” Mariano recalled. “Finally he said, ‘Maybe I’ll box,’ just to shut me up. These kids have no hopes and dreams. They expect to be right where they are.”

The son of a disabled veteran, Mariano was the oldest of nine children. The family lived in the Valley for about 20 years. Today, he says he can still see his friend’s father in the doorway, on the day he learned he wasn’t considered good enough to play with a friend.

“When someone says you’re not a worthwhile person as a child, it impacts your life,” he said. “Our residents expect to fail at almost everything they do, so they just give up. That’s about the saddest thing I can think of. It’s not right, not in America. I didn’t come here to change windows and fix doors. I came to change lives.”

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